Portfolio Overview

Sluggish but very active

I have been sluggish with the updates here but very active in the background and made a lot of changes.

Most changes to the core of the framework are tiny changes but I have made a big change by finally moving all websites over to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Plus I updated some of the other project websites.

Following is a quick overview and probably some more detailed information about each in the following days. First the big change.

Amazon Cloud

All my websites are now running in the Amazon Cloud, commonly known as AWSEC2. The move was not without hiccups but overall I am very happy with the result.

Dedicated Linux server

Having your own dedicated Linux instance instead of the hosted Linux account requires more efforts on your part managing the system but that's what I need turning my framework into a valuable service.

Speed / Performance

Best part is the performance or speed I see with EC2. While my experience in terms of speed was quite sobering with FatCow and I always considered GoDaddy to be acceptable this is a whole new game.

With GoDaddy the response I saw at home in my browser was actually pretty good (< 1 second) but the crawl stats in Google's Webmaster Tools was telling a different story. For whatever unknown reasons it reported downloading times way above 1 second and averaged around 2 seconds. Testing with some proxy servers somewhat confirmed these results.

As an update I later wrote an article with some download speed graph where you can see the actual difference between GoDaddy and AWS EC2.

Countries List Project

To experiment with my framework I have created a few projects and the Countries List website is one of them.

countries-list.info

I finally bought some domains for this projects and made a few design changes and updates to the documentation. We will see if this will improve the ranking, i.e. if there will be some ranking at all. So far as a sub domain to my project's website basically none of the pages ever showed anywhere in Google's SERP.

API module

The most interesting part is working in the background with the addition of an API to the website. Currently the interface is only a RESTful server but it is a valuable test case for me to implement interfaces to any website with my framework.

The experience gathered with this simple interface allows me to setup the final pieces for my network and service platform. With APIs I will be able to manage services like DNS but most importantly create virtual hosts on multiple web servers from one interface.